The invention relates generally to the field of storage management, and more particularly to information storage management in distributed network systems.
Businesses and other organizations have a need to store information on multiple computer storage systems in order to ensure the reliability and availability of that information. Typically such computer storage systems are connected by some network to form a “grid” of computers. The grid may maintain numerous “objects,” or packages of data that are potentially structured and/or associated with metadata.
With such a grid, there is a problem of where to place a given object, either on the grid or somewhere external to it. Placement may be dictated by economic, physical, legal, or other considerations, which are often specific to the particular business or organization that is using the grid. Moreover, during the lifecycle of an object, its placement may change over time based on the above considerations. Manually managing placement of objects over time can be a difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone task.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method that permits users to specify rules for placement of objects and that automatically stores objects in accordance with those rules. By creating this interface and allowing it to drive object placement, the invention significantly reduces deployment costs, improves the flexibility of configuration and increases the value of file management for the end customer.